There are a number of priorities when we are starting a new business. A new company is always going to have a variety of pressing components to ensure that it hits the ground running, not least when it comes to marketing. Marketing is the key to drawing crowds, but it’s also how you will set yourself apart from the competition. What are the priorities, during the first few months of business, to ensure you are developing a marketing strategy that will work now and in the future?
Defining Your Goals
Goals tend to fall under getting new customers or raising awareness of the brand. Raising awareness of the brand is pivotal for so many, especially when they’re not able to put themselves in front of their key demographic. There are marketing techniques that will work here, such as pay per click, which ensures that you are casting your net wider. While a pay per click agency can help you, you have to remember if you’re choosing to acquire new customers as a priority, you’ve got to have a solid approach to turn them from prospects into customers that will pay for you. This is why you will need to prioritise your overall branding and how you design your website, the copy you create, and how you are going to get people’s attention.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Reaching the right people is more important than just getting your services out there. As you develop a strategy, you’ve got to understand who your ideal audience is or could be. If you are working towards B2B sectors, how is your service or product more beneficial to businesses within certain industries or of certain sizes? When you start to think about why customers choose you over your competitors and you start to create a buyer profile, you can start to tweak your marketing efforts to suit them.
Picking the Right Channels
Any marketing strategy benefits from the right type of website, how the adverts are being targeted, as well as search engine optimisation. When you are targeting adverts to people who visit or navigate away from the website, you can ensure greater exposure to your business. This doesn’t necessarily guarantee people will come back, but it’s about reiterating the message. There is a lot of competition out there, which is why you need to uniquely position yourself within the market, and SEO will increase the visibility of your website through search engines; ensuring that you comply with SEO basic principles will give you a far better scope.
Promoting Offline
It’s just as important to ensure that your business is visible in the real world. If you are running a small home-based business and you are relying on local custom, offline promotions and going where your customers are is going to develop far more effective business relationships. Arguably, if you want to get the edge, you can separate yourself from any businesses by advertising in the real world, especially those smaller companies that are purely focused on social media.
Ensuring that we have the priority set when we start out is so important because it will guarantee that our company has the foundation in place.